May 8, 2025
Keeping tech free
The results are in. The votes have been counted. The outcome is no surprise.
Back on Halloween, when we ran our article on Ross Gardler’s presentation on “Microsoft and Open Source” at the All Things Open conference, we posted a poll that asked, “Is Microsoft committed to open source?” Guess what? You answered “no,” as in “nope,” “nadda” or “ain’t no way, baby.”
The results of our “One Size Fits All” poll on phone and PC interfaces are in. Once again, we find that our thinking doesn’t match the majority.
Microsoft got themselves in a heck of a mess when they insisted their users should happily adopt their phone interface on their desktops. This didn’t work out well, with Windows PC users pretty much refusing to upgrade to Windows 8. Since then, Microsoft has backed down somewhat with version 8.1, but it’s too soon to tell how that’s going to work out for them.
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Apple and Google have chosen thus far to keep desktop and mobile not only on separate interfaces, but on separate platforms as well. Apple, of course, uses iOS for the iPhone and OS X for their line of Macintosh computers. Google has Android for mobile devices and Chrome OS for laptops. In both cases, the interface and branding are completely different for mobile and traditional devices.
The results of our “Redmond Road Poll” are in.
About a month ago we decided to speculate on where Microsoft would be five years down the road. Obviously, the company is in transition and is trying to reinvent itself fast. The traditional desktop market, where Windows dominates, isn’t going anywhere and reports of it’s demise are premature, but it is shrinking and becoming much less important, especially in consumer space.
In addition, Microsoft is facing increasing competition on the desktop. Apple’s desktop market share has been on a slow upward tick for five years or so, and Google’s Linux based Chrome OS is gaining enough traction to prompt the Motley Fool to ponder if it could “destroy Windows.” Adding to Microsoft’s woes is the fact that nearly every major OEM has gotten serious about adding well configured Linux machines, mostly running Ubuntu, to their consumer lineup.
Earlier this week at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo in Orlando, Microsoft’s lame duck President, Steve Ballmer, once again restated his vision for “One Microsoft/one world.”
Actually, we jest. As reported by Larry Dignan on CNET, the vision remains a single Windows GUI to be used across all devices, from smartphone to tablet to PC. That’s what he and the rest of the crowd in Redmond have been saying since long before the release of Windows 8, when Metro was still Metro, which was their first attempt at implementing this one-size-fits-all vision. Nevermind that it hasn’t worked for them so far. You know what they say about “try, try, try and try again?”
We’re flabbergasted.
Usually when we run a poll we’re not surprised by the answers. We’re certainly surprised by these results, however.
A month ago, on September 2nd to be exact, we asked you, “Does GNU/Linux offer too many choices? Are there too many Linux distros?” As answers we offered the numbers one through five with one meaning way too many, five meaning way too few and three meaning just about right. As we expected, number three received the most votes, but not by a large margin.
Yikes! We got behind in looking at the results of the polls we run here on FOSS Force, which means we’ve got some catching up to do.
What was your opinion on the GPL?
Back on June 30th we asked you, “Which of the following best describes your thoughts about the GPL?” The poll’s been active since, though for most of that time it’s been buried in the article What’s Your Take on the GPL? back in our archives. We took it down just this morning.
In this poll we offered the following options as answers:
Since I’ve been following Linux and FOSS (thirteen years or so by my estimation), questions regarding choice, or too much of it, have been bandied about in Linux circles. Some penguinistas point proudly to the long list of GNU/Linux distros, proclaiming choice to be wonderful and a positive aspect of life in the land of Linux. Others bemoan the sheer number of distros, saying having so many of them has made Linux confusing for newcomers and is otherwise inefficient.
I’ve always considered this to be a rather nonsensical discussion. To begin with, it is what it is. There are a gazillian distros out there, whether we like it or not, and complaining there are too many accomplishes absolutely nothing but to make the complainers out to be whiners–but that’s just my humble opinion.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
In this competition there’s a winner but no losers.
Although only one site gets to call themselves the “FOSS Force Best FOSS or Linux Blog–2013” winner, in reality everybody in the competition has won.
Today we are announcing the winner from a field of ten great blogs, all of which have already won our elimination round. Before that there were 19 truly great blogs in our competition, nine of which had been chosen by visitors to our site, the other ten being hand-picked by us here at FOSS Force as a way of getting things going. They are all winners just by dint of being in the running.
This really is a horse race now, with ten great blogs at the starting gate to determine who gets the bragging rights to claim the…
We were hoping to have 20 to 25 blogs for you to choose from here in round two of our competition to see who wins the honors as FOSS Force Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog–2013. We end up offering you a total of 19.
Voters in our qualifying poll that finished at noon today wrote-in plenty of web sites for us to consider. The trouble was, most of them didn’t meet the criteria we set-out in the article titled What’s Your Favorite FOSS or Linux Blog? which was published on July 29th when we began this competition.
To a degree, we expected that. We knew some voters would write-in names of great Linux sites that in no way qualify as personal blogs. That they did, placing votes for many of our favorite sites and for some we think downright silly. So we first cleared out votes for sites that obviously don’t qualify, such as Omg! Ubuntu!, phoronix and OStatic.
After taking care of that task we were left with a long list of sites. As most were unknown to us, we had
